ProActive routing in scalable data centers with PARIS

Abstract

Modern data centers must scale to a large number of servers, while offering flexible placement and migration of virtual machines. The traditional approach of connecting layer-two pods through a layer-three core constrains VM placement. More recent 'flat' designs are more flexible but have scalability limitations due to flooding/broadcasting or querying directories of VM locations. Rather than reactively learn VM locations, our PARIS architecture has a controller that pre-positions IP forwarding entries in the switches. Switches within a pod have complete information about the VMs beneath them, while each core switch maintains complete forwarding state for part of the address space. PARIS offers network designers the flexibility to choose a topology that meets their latency and bandwidth requirements. We evaluate our PARIS prototype built using OpenFlow-compliant switches and NOX controller. Using PARIS we can build a data center network that supports up to 100K servers.